The 520 Floating Bridge: An Appreciation and a Fond Farewell

In my twenty years in Seattle, one of the things I’ve enjoyed most was the 520 floating bridge. That and Mt. Rainier have, at times, been enough persuasion to keep me here when the yen to return to my Southern roots was strong upon me. I know that reads like an empty sentiment but it’s not. I have been one hair from packing it in a couple of times and then caught a glimpse of The Mountain or been riding across The Bridge and quietly realized that my impulse was just that: an impulse; a fleeting rush of frustration or homesickness and not a valid reason to uproot my life. I’m grateful to The Bridge and The Mountain for being my stabilizers, the governors of my raging emotions. I like the I-90 bridge but it lacks a certain, funky, down-homeness of that creaking old pool float at Evergreen Point. I don’t feel the water on I-90. On 520, you can’t help it. It’s a thrill ride and a scenic bonanza and hitting the Trifecta of seeing Rainer to the south, Baker to the north, and the Cascades straight ahead is sometimes the only thing that makes returning to Bellevoid palatable for me.

But Tuesday, December 27th will be my last trip across The Bridge, at least with me behind the wheel. If I’m riding with another person, of course, I’m not going to be so boorish as to impose my values on them and, indeed, I’m not advocating that you adopt my views now. They’re mine, I’m not trying to sell them as a board game the whole family can play. If I have some compelling reason to take a bus, of course, I’ll shut up and read my Kindle. I realize I can’t change the world to suit me – a reality that a lot of people in this state would do well to dwell upon for a few moments.

But we all have our lines in the sand and this is mine. I cannot and do not condone the arbitrary, fait accompli nature of the decision to impose a $160 a month fee for people in Seattle and on the Eastside to go to work. We’re in the most significant economic downturn of the past fifty years and the cost of everything is rising to levels which have me thinking of the real possibility of a Depression or a consumer revolt, and some collection of jackasses sat down and said, “Okay, what should we charge for the toll on 520?” And you KNOW these were people to whom $160 a month is about what they tip for lunches. They were NOT single mothers, minimum wage laborers, office drudges, salespeople on commission, people paying their own business mileage, or anyone to whom the necessity to make every single penny count is a quotidian reality that never allows for any relief.

I’ve been fortunate in my life. I could easily pay the toll, as long as I’m frugal about the perceived necessity of going to Seattle. I don’t have to stay off the bridge. I’m just choosing to because this howling desperation to build a new bridge – NOW, in this universal down-turn – erased any idea of fairness and financial impact from the minds of the planners. If this toll had been $2, each way, I wouldn’t be writing this now. If it had been set up so that people who can ill afford to pay the toll got some relief, I wouldn’t be writing this now. If it didn’t actively discourage tourism with the spectre of the Washington Attorney General’s office having to file suits all over the country to recoup bridge tolls from tourists who didn’t even realize that, by driving across our bridge, they incurred a fee which they have to pay or get chased by the WA Toll Police, I wouldn’t be writing this now. If the whole process of just trying to work the voluminous bugs out of the electronic systems that will do this pickpocket tolling hadn’t been such a cluster-___k from the word go – so that we all KNOW, down to our bones, that the system will falter and massive numbers of people will be mis-billed or their Go Passes drained – I wouldn’t be…well, I’d be writing something slightly different now.

This is just a bad freakin’ idea, as it stands now. The state of Washington, as you may recall, is the same collection of fools who can’t seem to limp along on a $21 billion budget and which seems clueless about the big stuff – roads, stadiums, parks, law enforcement, etc. – but fixates on stuff which gets them branded, justifiably, as “The Nanny State”, because they want so desperately to have something out of their annual legislative docket that they can actually manage to do, as opposed to the endless chorus of partisan and special interest bickering that is all they can manage on major issues. We can make sure nobody is riding along without a seat belt – even though the consequences of not clicking it affect absolutely NO ONE but the simple sap who refuses to do it – but they can’t figure out how to accommodate building light rail in less than 25 years or how to simply balance their own %$@#ing budget. So these low-brows- and their lesser minions – are the folks who are running the show on the 520 Bridge?

Farewell, my sweet, shabby, funky old friend. I’ve loved you from afar and from your rutted deck and it will cause me real pain not to see the look on the faces of out-of-town guests as we come off the West High-rise and they see that they’re actually going to be right on the freakin’ water! That is priceless…and so are you. Maybe I’ll see you again, on any kind of regular basis, one day. But knowing how Olympia loves a gravy train, I don’t see the toll being either eliminated when the bridge is paid off or lowered out of common decency/sense. On those odd occasions when somebody else is hauling my skinny, hillbilly fanny across your deck, I’ll savor the moment. But your stewards, your trustees, your alleged advocates have ruined the experience for me.

Oh, and BTW: don’t anyone waste their energy to respond to this like a certain public official’s office did to my last piece about the tolling, saying, basically and simple-mindedly, “If you don’t pay for the bridge, don’t expect to use it when it’s paid off.” I’ll use the bridge daily, after it’s paid and with tolls removed, because my sales tax dollars go into the state’s coffers just like everybody else’s.

And if anybody in Olympia knew how to handle the money they do take in, this toll would not be necessary. The shabby truth is, we’ve already paid for this bridge, renovations included. It’s just that the state’s inability to perceive and handle money doesn’t allow them to see that. Well, tough beans, guys.

As I told the public official last time: Do your job anywhere near as well as the average Washingtonian does his or hers and you won’t need to “correct your lack of knowledge about public improvement projects”. You’d have money and know what the heck to do with it. I might as well have been talking to The Bridge, really. People who plan and execute projects like this are hardly immune to group-think and this is a textbook example of it.